The Rise Of Open Source Hardware | Popular Science

abernard102@gmail.com 2014-10-07

Summary:

"Emile Petrone founded Tindie for selfish reasons. 'The basic idea was that there wasn’t a marketplace for the things I was interested in,' he says. At the time, those things were his latest DIY hardware obsessions—specifically, kits to support Arduino and Raspberry Pi. 'Ebay’s not really right, and neither is Amazon. Hardware projects had no natural home.'  So in the summer of 2012, Petrone (then an engineer at a Portland startup) launched a site where flexible matrix boards and laser motion sensors could be sold alongside build-it-yourself weather monitoring kits and robot birds. Almost immediately, Tindie began attracting favorable attention from the indie hardware community—and then expanded from there. Today, around 600 inventors sell more than 3,000 different hardware products, which have shipped out to more than 80 countries around the world. Some customers are hobbyists like Petrone, but others are large entities like the Australian government, Google and NASA. These days, Petrone says, 'NASA’s purchasing department just calls my cell phone.'  The site has also gained a strong following from hard-core DIY types. Just as Etsy became the go-to marketplace for craft creators, Tindie has become the primary hub for hardware aficionados ... While Petrone achieved his goal of creating a marketplace for hardware projects, Tindie also inadvertently made a second contribution to the hardware world: it now stands as the largest collection of open-source hardware on the planet ..."

Link:

http://www.popsci.com/article/diy/rise-open-source-hardware

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » abernard102@gmail.com

Tags:

oa.new oa.comment oa.tindie oa.hardware oa.floss oa.tools

Date tagged:

10/07/2014, 07:19

Date published:

10/07/2014, 03:19